The end of the mouse has ended

This blog is abandoned. Please see new work on whatbirdsgiveup.com.

the elephant thought

"this world"
is a religious saying
"this " figures

Streets Enough to Welcome Snow by Rosmarie Waldrop

Streets Enough to Welcome Snow by Rosmarie Waldrop


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
My five stars are based on an average rating of the sections. Mostly the book was a good solid 4-star read--you know: smart, classic-rosmarie goodness. But. One section, "Providence in Winter," received one of my famous, late-night, thousand-star downpours. Reading it felt like swimming. Call me a sucker. Call me a snorkeler.

View all my reviews >>

Humours Run Deep by Tom Bridwell

Humours Run Deep by Tom Bridwell


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
One of those crazy could-have-only-found-it-in-houston books that I'm so glad I bought. This book runs fast across the surface--as folksy as abstract as technical as he wants to be. I tinkled (perfectly literary response) with its many rolling-over inflect/ions. If you can find a copy, pick it up!

View all my reviews >>

The Romance of Happy Workers by Anne Boyer

The Romance of Happy Workers by Anne Boyer


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Hell to the yes Anne Boyer for her smirky yawp at the piddly moon. Just when I started to worry about whether poetry's meta-isms are just masturbatory, it hit me: masturbating is great. Of course! We should all be rubbing them out with as much gusto as Boyer in this awesome book.

View all my reviews >>

Miniature: Poems by Mac Wellman

Miniature: Poems by Mac Wellman


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Mac Wellman Mac Wellman Mac Wellman! An utterly sputtering act of macro-writing on (you thought they were small) points. All hail all that choruses in cinched jeering omni-verses. Come combustible choruses! Come wiry, thirsty choruses! The undoable diddles. The pekingese boxes. The nectar just spazzes as it makes its way down. Call that a 'Mac Wellman!' Play it again.

View all my reviews >>

Alexis Smith (b. 1949)

Alexis Smith (b. 1949)
Life In America (1991)
Directed by Peter Kirby.




For the past 20 years Alexis Smith's mixed media work has explored primal American myths: the open road, the bad/good guy/gal, the quest for romance, and the search for paradise. This portrait of the artist explores the roots of her thought and work, and was produced in conjunction with her exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, held in November 1991.

This film has been made available on UbuWeb by the kind permission of Peter Kirby.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Alexis Smith: Life In America (1991) (ubu.com)

The Painted Room: A Tale of Mantua by Inger Christensen

The Painted Room: A Tale of Mantua by Inger Christensen


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Inger Christensen does not fail me on the first day of 2010. She my patron saint of peeling paint and intrigue and loftiness. This is the plottiest plot I've ever loved and I love it for its swiftness and obliqueness and because it reminds me of Gabriel García Márquez. This is the year of the fool and foolish accounts. This is the year of sour wine that blossoms sweetly. This is the year of Maria. Call us Maria. Call all of us one name.

View all my reviews >>

Chris Burden (b. 1946)

Chris Burden (b. 1946)
A Twenty-Year Survey, Newport Harbor Art Museum - A Video Portrait (1989)



Directed and Edited by Peter Kirby
Director of Photography: Dan Zimbaldi
Co-production of
Newport Harbor Art Museum
Media Art Services
Zona Productions
length 27:45

Arabesque for Kenneth Anger (1958-61)
Marie Menken (1910-1970)


16mm, color, sound, 4 min
Original score by Teiji Ito. "A new sound version of this classic. It is a beautiful experience to see her fabulous shooting. The cutting is just as fabulous and is something for all to study; the new score by Teiji Ito is 'out of this world' with its many leveled instrumentation. Marie says 'These animated observations of tiles and Moorish architecture were made as a thank-you to Kenneth for helping to shoot on another film in Spain.' Shot in the Alhambra in one day." -- Gryphon Film Group

The Cafe At Light by Mark McMorris

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
ok. solid book. certainly journaly, collecting/recovering conversations, travelogues, architectures. Certainly slipping between times/places and there was a great deal put into the caryatids. And certainly more moderny than I was prepared for, but more prosey too. won me over in the horses passages-god I loved the horse passages-and certainly ok in all other respects and felt and refreshingly informal.

View all my reviews >>

Shot by Christine Hume

My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I am an unwilling proponent of this book because the first poem, Incubatory, convinced me that I hated it. But as I read (forcing myself to read, really, because I like Counterpath press so much) I began to think hating this book is part of loving it. It is annoying, it blurts things out, it gets excited with itself, it overkills -- but it also sees everything (good and bad) through. The thinking is sloppy at times, but it stomps through on pure gall getting us somewhere pretty fucking original. In fact, the book does remind me of a certain type of performance whereby an actor/speaker breaks her contract with the audience, giving her the distance she needs to really freak out and do something. I think that's what happened here. I had to be really far away from the speaker to witness the full range of motion in these poems.

View all my reviews >>

"People are the same all over, cut"

Vanessa Place & Robert Fitterman - Notes On Conceptualisms: eastcoast/westcoast (2009)

"...The conversation is more presence by its absence.... the fact that the book is not being talked about leads me very much to suspect that its all anyone is talking about..."



Vanessa Place & Robert Fitterman - Notes On Conceptualisms: eastcoast/westcoast (2009)

Vanessa Place & Robert Fitterman
with Kim Rosenfield
filmed by Coco
edited by Fred Barney Taylor


In the DIY video, Place and Fitterman pirate the original eastcoast/westcoast by Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt to ponder the coastal reception of their book "Notes on Conceptualisms."

Robert Fitterman is the author of 11 books of poetry--he lives in NYC.
Vanessa Place is a writer and a lawyer. She lives in LA.

Plaisir d'amour en Iran (1976)

Plaisir d'amour en Iran (1976) by Agnès Varda (b. 1928)





35mm, 1976
Starring: Valérie Mairesse, Ali Raffi
6min


Made at a time when Iran had a seemingly revolving door for incoming European directors and bottomless funding for their projects, Plaisir d'amour en Iran is a short, sort of love story between a handsome Iranian (Ali Raffi) and a visiting French woman (Valérie Mairesse). The film was shot at the Shah Masjed in romantic Esfehan.

Tuned Droves by Eric Baus

I refuse to rate a book that requires its readers use antenna (either naturally occurring antenna and/or those erected using household materials).

View all my reviews >>

The Voice That Was in Travel: Stories by Diane Glancy

The Voice That Was in Travel: Stories by Diane Glancy


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I love Diane Glancy. I just do. I love the one that basically lists different types of fireworks. I love the one about the woman in her car (I thought of Barb driving to Detroit or New York). I love the one about what the fuck Mary is doing up there. I love the one about sewing a sheep suit. I really love that one. I love the one about shooting a woman with an arrow because it is oblique. I love Italy and Australia and I have actually looked up flights. I love how deadbeat it is and crowded and I know about postcards and thinking and re-thinking very vague statements about one's life. And wearing masks backwards. And seeing for the sake of seeing the brittle bones of one's own story. And relief when they almost collapse. Utter relief.

View all my reviews >>

The Cosmopolitan by Donna Stonecipher

The Cosmopolitan by Donna Stonecipher


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Maybe I should have liked this more. It was tight for sure. Tight and cool and it broke when it needed to break and it got wispy and floated and then it tightened up again and delivered. Delivery is big here. Maybe I'm not being fair because I haven't read this type of poetry in a while. The text felt so separate. It was it's own little engine and I was merely the reader. I didn't ride on the poems and or get inside them. I kept the proper distance and did what I was supposed to do. I guess what I'm saying is: I could have been reading an interesting, well-written article but instead I read these poems.

View all my reviews >>

Little Ease by Aaron McCollough

Little Ease by Aaron McCollough


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I loved this book this morning. It was cold and I loved hearing myself reading it to myself which is a little engine I created, which fits with the writing and the idea of stricture. I loved how far apart, how long, how missing. I loved the rigid little bridge of epigraphs. I loved the sections and I know it's silly to feel asleep in the language, so maybe taken care of or rocked or just blown on, and because I'm sick today and all my thoughts feel taken out of me and laid like eels on the bedstand -- I'm giving Little Ease one thousand stars. That's right. Every single one.

View all my reviews >>

Incivilities by Barbara Claire Freeman

Incivilities by Barbara Claire Freeman


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
You know you're a badass when Judith Butler does your blurb. I swung between liking and kinda liking this. A few times I smirked because it did some twirling and ta-da's. Sometimes the lines were like pick-up sticks--a rigid little nest -- and I liked it because it felt pumping up. Other times it felt like a rigid little maneuver which I didn't care as much for--but it was always smart and I did like that. But in the all-and-all of this day, I enjoyed reading it. aloud. Here's to you Black Friday, you prick of a day. I will go jogging now.

View all my reviews >>

Poetry State Forest by Bernadette Mayer

Poetry State Forest by Bernadette Mayer


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
The all hanging out and the lack of a snowblower, the tenebrous winter, the peeking. The dangling couplet, the twosome, the yoke, the other just-as-good yoke, the home stretch, the briars among the eggs, the new neighbors, the landscape of tyranny that has other names, the index of conversation, the breastplate, the snowblower o! and b for bushes, the caterwaul, the list of phil(s), the muffled heart, the fillings and other dental adventures, the notes to self, the notes that are to, the notes awaying and hey and ho and gentle looking-out-the-window-ness.

View all my reviews >>